In a conventional electronic commerce system, a user may request to receive a listing of items for purchase from the electronic commerce system. For example, the user may request to receive items that satisfy a search criterion, such as, an item name, shape, color, price, manufacturer name, type of material, and/or other criteria. Upon receiving the request by the user, the electronic commerce system presents the items that correspond to the search criterion in a user interface, such as a web site rendered by a browser.
According to one conventional technique, each item available through the electronic commerce system may have been tagged based on the attributes of the item. The attributes of the item are included in metadata associated with the item via a manual tagging process. Alternatively, the attributes of the item may be associated with the item by employing a file name naming convention to encode the attribute information. In response to receiving the user request, the electronic commerce system presents the items that correspond to the search criterion by comparing the metadata associated with each item and the search criterion. However, the items that correspond with the search criterion are unordered and/or unranked with respect to a similarity of the items. Another search may be necessary to further filter the items for identifying similarities between the items. Thus, two searching queries may be necessary to first identify the items that correspond to the search criterion and then rank the items according to a similarity. Further, significant resources may be necessary for creating and maintain a metadata database and for engaging in the manual tagging process.